In Our Time - The Soul

Episode Date: June 6, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Soul. In his poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ WB Yeats wrote:An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress. For Plato it was the immortal seat of reason, for Aristotle it could be found in plants and animals and was the essence of every being - but it died when the body died. For some it is the fount of creativity, for others the spark of God in man. What is the soul made of and where does it live? Is it the key to our individuality as humans? And when we die will our souls find paradise or purgatory, rebirth, resurrection or simply annihilation? With Richard Sorabji, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College; Ruth Padel, poet and author; Martin Palmer, Theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in sailing to Byzantium, WBH wrote, An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing,

and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress. This week on In Our Time we'll be discussing the soul, For Plato it was the immortal seat of reason. For Aristotle it could be found in plants and animals and was the essence of every being, but it died when the body died. For some it's the font of creativity. For some the spark of God in man. For others it's a chimera.

What is the soul made of and where does it live? Is it the key to our individuality as humans? And when we die will our souls find paradise or purgatory, rebirth, resurrection, or simply annihilation? With me to discuss the soul of Richard Sir Abjee, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, Ruth Padel, poet and author of In and Out of the Mind, tragic images of self and body, and Martin Palmer, theologian and director of the international consultancy

on religion, education and culture. Martin Palmer, before we unravel them, can you describe what you see as a three major and distinct ideas of the soul? I think there are three, that's slightly simplifying it, to put it mildly, but three core ones. One is what we call the Vedic view, that comes out of the Rig Vader and the traditions of India.

And that is a reincarnational view that the soul essentially is migrating through a series of bodies, gaining experience it goes. Sometimes it slides backwards, sometimes it goes forward. Hence snakes and ladders was actually originally a Hindu game of reincarnation.

I had an interesting thought when you're playing it next with your children. But it was the idea that you were progressing your way slowly. So, for example, even a figure such as the Buddha, probably the best known figure in the West in terms of reincarnation, went through countless lives in order to become the Buddha. And so the soul was something completely separate from the physical.

It simply used the physical to sort of improve or backslide, depending on how good a life you were having at the time. The second approach would be really what we would turn the Abrahamic approach. That's the faiths that looked at Abraham as their founder, Judaism, Christianity, Islam. And that essentially takes the view that this world is where you're tested. it's rather like sort of school examination day. If you do well, then you pass on into paradise or heaven or wherever it is that the tradition says. And if you fail, then you do. You fail. You are out.

And you're down into purgatory or into hell. Though some of those ideas were not there in original Judaism, for instance. Originally Judaism had no idea what happened to the soul. It kind of wandered off into a rather sort of vague waiting room. And that's the Abrahamic perspective. of one life, see how you do here. But then, as usual, the Chinese completely mess up any attempt to have a systematic and tidy relationship

because they have all those views, but on top of that the concept of immortality in Taoism, whereby the soul is immortal, has the potential to be immortal, but only if you can make the body immortal as well. So whereas in both the Vedic and the Abrahamic traditions, the body essentially is something that is inhabited by the soul, and the soul then moves on from. In Taoism, the tradition is that unless you can make your body immortal,

your soul doesn't survive, which led to some very worrying experiments of trying to transform your body into indestructible elements, such as drinking mercury and eating gold and jade, which in the pursuit of long life often led to some rather short lives. Well, that was a wonderful brief panorama. Thank you very much. People who regularly listen to this programme will be amazed

that we're this far in, and we haven't mentioned the word Greeks yet. But looking back to the 8th century BC, before the ideas that you've been discussing were developed, before then, what kind of people were thought to have a soul? And looking at Greece is an example of people thinking about it. Well, for instance, if one reads Homer, the individual was really little more than a plaything of the gods

that dramas were enacted using human beings as chess pieces to a certain degree. and so fate and free will were entirely in the hands of the divine. It was rather like a sort of divine soap opera in which you were part players. Ruth, Ruth Padel, would you agree with that about Homer? Not entirely. With Homer, you've got a wonderful insight into the disunity of the person, and every person is presented as a sort of chaos of lots of different impulses. And the gods do have input into them,

so that the God might throw a thought, into your soul or into your mind, and you'll do it. But there are feelings seething away in there as well. But can we look at Homer, can I look at the 8th century abuse here? Can we say there is an idea of soul somewhere in that? There's something which we can carry on and talk about now. We can identify with a lot of the ways the person is presented in the centre of the person, and the word psyche, which should probably be put on the table here,

which we take to mean soul, which might come from the word, for blowing. So possibly it's the idea of a sort of breath, the breath of life. And Homer uses the word psuchet, partly to mean life. You struggle about your life, meaning you're engaged in mortal combat,

or that you breathe your psuchet out, meaning when you die. So that's one sense of Homer's use of use of psuchet. And the other one is for the departed souls. When you die, these souls like shades, like little images, of you as your body goes squeaking off down to Hades

and flit around in Hades. So I suppose that is the beginning of the Homer's, the Greek view, of soul after death. Coming up, we're not on Plato, but before him, around the time of Pythagoras, what did they think the soul was made of

and why did it live? Right. Well, the Preciocratics were in multiplicity and they had lots of different ideas. I mean, Heroclitus, for instance, thought that soul had or was made of fire in water or was fire, or the best sort of soul was a fiery soul. And if your soul got moist, you were sort of rather drunk and childish. Pythagoras was possibly the first who thought of the soul as something that was purifiable and stainable.

I don't know if Richard would agree with that. And you could live, you lived your life, your soul went on through different bodies. And if you purified your soul, then you, you. you'd have a better life in the next. We're still talking about something that is very, has been around for a much longer time. When you look at the Egyptian civilisation, they're burying people with food.

They're going on journeys in the Bronze Age. People are in fetal positions with food. There's tubes coming out. They're on their way to somewhere. So something is going on to somewhere. It's sort of gathering force, isn't it, as an idea that the people are beginning to think about it? Yeah, somewhere around 500 BC,

a new concept comes in, in which the soul is suddenly allied to the, the moral. And also then in certain people like Heraclitus, understanding the knowledge, your knowledge of the soul is related to knowledge of the cosmos, so that the structure of the world outside is paralleled by the structure of whatever is in you. And you use the metaphors.

Metaphor is something that you have to keep using and thinking about and talking about soul of understanding the outside in order to understand the inside. Richard Serabji, would you say that can we settle on Plato now and say what he brought to the table to this. How does he see the soul? Because he begins to put forward a structure and an idea

which it seems to me, especially into what Martin said, the beginning developed into the Abrahamic ideas and so on. Can we talk about Plato's notion of the soul? Yes, yes. Plato came to think that the soul had three parts, not just reason, but also two emotional parts.

There's the domineering part of the soul and there's the part of the soul which has lower desires and appetites. And he thought it was important to keep all these three parts of the soul in mind in order to educate people. If you only train their reason, it won't be effective. So you need non-rational forms of education as well, such as music. And this emotional type of education should even start in the womb,

with the way the mother walks and so on. So he thought it was very important to understand all three parts of the soul because all three have to be looked after. Does he find a location for the soul? Does he find a purpose for it? Does he find a future for it? Yes, indeed. He does think that at least some parts of the soul are immortal.

In one work he says that it's only the reason part that's immortal. Although the reason part isn't just a calculating computer, It has the desires and pleasures of learning and understanding. What does he mean by a mortarages? Does he mean it comes back or it goes on or it passes on to somebody else? What does he mean by a mortality? He thinks it can live separated from anybody, but he also thinks, like Pythagoras, whom Ruth mentioned,

that it will come back and be reincarnated in different bodies. And he thinks that animals are, evolved out of humans because animals are reincarnations of humans who haven't used their reason well. In some dialogues at any rate, he thinks that animals still have reason, but it's atrophied and not being used properly. He also thinks that plants have souls, but because he connects the soul with consciousness, he only justifies this by saying that plants can feel.

How did Aristotle's idea of the soul differ from Plato's? Well, I'd like to draw a contrast between Plato and Aristotle because I think these are two very different traditions that Europe's had to decide between or try to harmonise somehow. Aristotle was very different from Plato because he had, as you said, a biological concept of the soul so that even plants had soul, but not for Plato, reason, not because plants were conscious, but because

for Aristotle, soul was the set of capacities that manifest life. Now, some of those capacities are capacities for consciousness, for thought, perception, desire, but plants only have the capacity to use food to maintain a certain structure and to pass on to their offspring, that same structure, which doesn't involve consciousness at all. And so he has a concept of the soul which doesn't involve consciousness.

He extends it to plants, but not in order to make plants conscious. And that is a huge difference. And another huge difference is that the soul is so connected with the body that it perishes when we die. And I think the last thing to say about Aristotle is that he thinks that animals have souls all right, no Greeks denied that, but they don't have. have the rational soul on his view, and that's the big difference between humans and animals. So now that's an enormous contrast with Plato, and forever afterwards Western thought has to

decide how it's going to accommodate to such very different views. Martin Palmer, you have said that around the turn of the millennium, a few hundred years around the dawn of the first millennium, a big shift took place in the understanding of the soul in many parts of the world, and you associate that with. very much with social upheavals, particularly to do with savage massacres and so on. Very much so. And what you have both in the Middle East and in China and to a certain degree also in India with the experience of Ashoka, the emperor there,

is that an existing system whereby your place within the cosmos, and I think Ruth's point about the emerging idea of a self is intimately linked into a thorough going cosmology because then you have to work out where you are within this entire space. It's going back to Jung's Freud that we have to have a series of beliefs. Otherwise, we'd be crushed by the sheer awfulness of the universe.

And once you begin to explore the universe as a cosmological reality and a spiritual reality, you have to have a structure that keeps you sane, basically. And essentially the old covenants, the old traditions whereby the king or the emperor or the pharaoh or the leader of the war band was your representative to the gods and a deal had been struck whereby basically the harvests would come in and the young would be okay and wars would go moderately well. Breaks down dramatically with a series of cataclysmic events.

In China it's the coming of the first emperor around 221 BC who seeks to wipe out all books, all knowledge of everything that had existed before, with two exceptions, one book on agriculture and one book on divination. All history books or philosophy books are burnt and destroyed. Scholars are buried alive, and he just breaks the whole country. A similar experience happens for Judaism in that they rise up around about 165 BC against the Greek Empire, and terrible massacres take place when the Greeks, having done good comparative religion,

decide to strike on the Sabbath and massacre the Jews on Sabbaths when they cannot raise the sword to defend themselves. And the question comes up, what on earth is going on? You know, if we're observing the laws, but we're being killed because we observe the laws, then what's happening?

And in India you have a shocker with this terrible experience, a great war leader, and he wins a battle at such cost. and he walks over the battlefield and sees the thousands of dead and his basic understanding of a covenant, if you like, between him and the gods breaks down. This happens time and time again. So what emerges from that is a sense that we can no longer rely

upon our leader, emperor, king, whatever it is, to be our mediator with the divine. We now have to establish our own system of mediation. So in China, after the experience of the First Emperor, you get the rise of a huge number of divination books that offer the possibility of some kind of discourse with the divine. And in Judaism you begin to get the idea that if you die righteously here,

you will actually live afterwards in a better place, which is a new idea for Judaism at that time. Ruth Badele, does Greek tragedy come on this? Does that demonstrate the individuality that Martin was talking about moving towards? I think there's a bit too much, historical causality around here for me, and I think that the things happening in the Greek world, when Greek tragedy started, which is about in the 470s BC, and Athenian tragedy, because it was at Athens,

that tragedy was developed, is exploring inherited ideas of divinity some of the sort of skepticism that some people were voicing about whether our ideas of the gods were right or even pious, or maybe all ideas. of the gods were projections of how we saw ourselves. But they're also exploring their ideas of the person and of society. And you can also talk about it as the soul sort of looking out with eyes, the soul perceiving something. The soul is the thing that is within you which can be illumined, whether by a revelation or by a glimpse of a divine

or glimpse of something happening in the world. Before we move away from Greece, because it's quite a long way to go, but we're not going to get there. It's good along the way. Richard's Rabbech, Socrates, friends, were concerned as to what would happen to his individuality after his death. How did Plutinus and other followers of Plato approach the question

of whether individuality would survive? Well, Plato created something of a problem because although Socrates assures his friends that, as he puts it, I will survive, when Plato says, as he does in many places, that the true self is reason, he makes the true self sound a bit impersonal. This was a problem for the Neoplatonists.

The Neoplatonist started 600 years after Plato and 250 AD, and Plotinus really wrestles with this. He feels in one way it would be better if we, after death became disembodied, pure reason, all thinking the same thoughts, but then how would we be distinct from each other? How would we have individuality? And the best compromise he can hit on is the analogy of a theorem in a mathematical system. Each theorem is an distinct individual theorem,

and yet no theorem can be understood except as a part of the whole mathematical system. That's the analogy he keeps coming. back to. So it's a sort of very unstable compromise. And what happened was that after him, different interpreters who'd read Plotinus and other Neoplatonist texts went one way or the other. So that there's one not so well-known, but very important, later Neoplatonist, whose name is Themistius in the 4th century AD, who plumps for, no, humans have individually. intellects. And then very famously there's a great Arabic philosopher around 1200 AD, Averroes in the Latin version of his name, who says no, human beings don't have individual intellects.

There's just one human intellect. And Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century had to see whether Aristotle could be accommodated to Christianity and say he was thoroughly cheered up by reading the mischis. And he said, there you are. You see, the Aristotelian tradition allows us to think that human beings have individual intellects, which can be disembodied, can be immortal. So Aristotle is compatible with Christianity on this. We can look forward to our intellectual parts of ourselves,

at any rate, having individual immortality. Well, you did a hell of a hop-skip and a jump there, Richard. You went over, I'll just a quick calculation in about 1,700 years. Very, very, very, I can you take to us... No, it was great. Right. Just tug us back a little bit. Martin, you've argued that Christianity offers a particular intimate relationship with God. You call it a negotiated relationship with God.

And Augustine brought in an idea that there was a moral aspect to the soul. Now, most people, many people, most people, I'd guess, listening to this programme, will think of the soul in terms of Christianity. But there is a Christian soul. Now, can you tell us how the Christian soul, this moral agent, which was yet connected with the body, came into being, when it came into being, what it took from the Greeks,

what it got from elsewhere if it did, sorry about this, but could you do that? In one minute, is it? No, no, no. I mean, I get half, a minute and a half. We can devote the rest of the approach into this. It's three times longer than an article in the Observer. You've got bags of time.

Where you go. Well, I think I would go back to, I think, what happens with the emergence of Judaism as a missionary faith and then Christianity as a missionary faith, which is a new phenomena. I mean, bear in mind that the Greeks never actually sent out teams of missionaries to explicitly convert other people, no more than did the druids

of Britain or the priests of Jupiter of Rome. The traditions we've been talking about are in a sense, essentially, indigenous traditions that made sense of gathered wisdom over centuries. What happens with the emergence of the missionary religions, which begins with Buddhism in the third century BC, and gathers steam, is that you begin to get world religions that say, actually what we have to say is true for everybody. But in order to make that statement and to move into cultures that had previously had no experience of being proselytized at all,

they had to find some way of finding phrases, terms that they could latch on to it. So you have an extremely fundamental shift in the way that religion operates with the coming of the missionary faiths because they're now saying that what we are teaching isn't just true for our tribe, our clan, our family. It is universally true.

And this is where you begin to get the concept of the relationship between a soul, the divine, a morality. Because you're actually arguing for the first time that our system, our beliefs, our relationship with God is more intimate, more profound, more workable, more magical than any other. You've got that wonderful story that Beed tells when the first Christian mission has come to the kingdom of Northumbria in 627.

And one of the Thanes is asked for his advice as to whether they should listen to this religion. He says, my lord, our life is like that of a sparrow that flies into your great hall from the winter storm. And for a brief period is warm, the smell, the sounds of your great hall is comforting. And then it flies out at the other end. We don't know where it came from. We don't know where it goes. That's how deep our understanding is of the soul at the moment. So if this lot, meaning the Christians, can shed some more light on this, well, why don't we listen?

So what you have in a sense, and I do go a little for the historical causality here, I think, Ruth, is you have a growth of religions that are actually trying to argue that what they are teaching is actually better than what went before. and so you get the relationship between a personal relationship with the divine, with a certain guarantee of afterlife, and a morality code by which you can judge whether you've actually met the target of the faith sets. Well, I think you did what you said you couldn't do. I think it's not very well. Can you bring that, Ruth Padel,

can you bring what Martinism is saying further towards the idea of the soul claiming for itself a moral dimension and being associated with the self, with individuality, which that was going along at the same time. Can you just give us something on that? Yes, I mean, it does go back to, there are Greek ingredients, aren't there,

in the Christian thing, particularly from Plato. The sense that you are responsible, even in Pythagoras, you are responsible for your soul. It's the part of you that you can do something about as we go to the gym and work out. you have to sort of purify your work out your soul as well. And there is a moral imperative there. And that was the part that went into, as it were, Renaissance Christianity.

So that I think somebody like Montaigne, when you're, they were tugged to and fro between Plato's idea that the soul is immaterial and immortal. And it goes on, it's the part of you that goes on after deaths. versus the Christian idea that you have the resurrection of the body. So some Christians are sort of washed over with Platonism and begin to think that the soul is immortal apart from the body. Martin, I'm sorry to love a big one at you again,

but here goes. I mean, you're sitting there just quite able to feel these. The idea of there being a soul and a body, Descartes credited with that concept of dualism. Where did he think the soul was? and why do you think he's been the subject of so much criticism, Descartes? I think what Descartes does is that he takes an existing tension within Christianity in particular, and I think Ruth's point about the re-emergence of Greek philosophy at the time of the Renaissance is enormously important,

because what you get at the time of the Renaissance is a shift from a sense that I am in community, therefore I am, which is essentially what the Catholic Church proposes. Here is the priest, here is the community. If you're baptized into this community, in a sense you're on the conveyor belt to somewhere, and it's up to you as to whether it's up or down in terms of the afterlife, to a relationship in which you stand before God on your own terms, which is essentially the heart of the Reformation.

And what is emerging there is a real grappling with the fact that yet again a covenant arrangement has broken down. The Catholic Church is no longer offering you all the answers. you're having to negotiate your own way. And Descartes takes that and actually elevates the concept of the individuality of each person to such a degree

that he forces apart the old covenant whereby I am in community, therefore I am. Do I think, therefore I am? It becomes a solely, I use that word carefully, a solely personal adventure. And that is where religion begins to have problems with him. because essentially he demolishes in one fell swoop

the need for the institutions of religion. Ruth Patel, do you think the DNA brings a different area of sort of bear on all this? It should do. I mean, if you're thinking of the soul as the kernel, as the sort of atomic centre of each person or each individual body and soul, then you're looking for it in the sort of most hidden secret crevices. Richard Sarabbyu. I understand you've said that you think the soul has now been replaced by the idea of the self. What do you mean by that? People are a bit reluctant to speak in terms of soul these days,

because they're not very sure that they can identify what it actually is, especially in the light of Descartes. Could I say a word about Descartes? I don't know whether you can. You don't ever think of it. I'm looking at that clock and there's that remorseless red hand ticking our mortality is... Descartes made this very strong distinction between soul and body, and if it's terribly distinct from the body and yet a subject that carries mental characteristics, people are not sure that there is such a thing. But they ought to recognise that there is such a thing as self.

They don't all do so, I'm afraid, but I believe that with infant psychology, you see you've got to think in terms of a concept like me. The infant's not going to survive its first years if it doesn't see the world in terms of this is within my reach, my mother's not looking at what I'm looking at, I've got back to where I was before, you've got to see the world in terms of me.

And so these questions that have worried people could the soul go on after death can now be put in terms of could I go on after death? So it's still a very sensible question. Well, thank you very much, Martin Farmer. Thank you, Ruth Fidel, and thank you, Richiezer. and thank you very much for listening.